Loyalty is expensive. In the high-stakes, gold-plated world of Sanjay Leela Bhansali, it’s also entirely negotiable.

The latest casualty in the prestige-drama arms race isn't a budget overrun or a delayed premiere. It’s Ismail Darbar. The man whose sweeping, orchestral melodies defined the Bhansali "brand" back when Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam was still a theater-filler says he’s been dumped. After eighteen months of labor on the Netflix opus Heeramandi, Darbar claims he was scrubbed from the credits and replaced by Bhansali himself.

"He betrayed me," Darbar told the press. He sounds less like a scorned collaborator and more like a guy who just realized the "creative partnership" was actually a one-way street.

It’s a classic move. We see it in Silicon Valley every quarter. The founder brings in the visionary architect to build the framework, sucks the marrow out of the concept, and then decides they’re the "Chief Product Officer" of the whole damn thing. In the era of the Auteur, the collaborator is just another asset to be liquidated.

Let’s look at the math. Eighteen months. That’s roughly five hundred and forty days of composing, arranging, and probably listening to Bhansali demand more "soul" while staring at a multi-million dollar set. Darbar isn't a novice. This is the guy who gave Devdas its heartbeat. But in the streaming ecosystem, the name on the thumbnail is the only one that matters to the algorithm. Netflix didn't buy a Darbar soundtrack; they bought the Bhansali Aesthetic™.

The "Aesthetic" is a hungry god. It requires total credit.

Bhansali’s pivot to music director isn't new, but it’s getting more aggressive. Since Guzaarish, he’s been increasingly hoarding the "Music By" credit. It’s a vanity play that works because nobody at the corporate level cares who actually sat at the harmonium until 3 AM. They care about the PR narrative of the "singular genius." It’s cleaner. It’s easier to market a one-man show than a messy, collaborative reality where a composer might actually have an opinion that clashes with the director’s mood board.

Darbar’s frustration feels grounded in a specific kind of old-school hurt. He talks about the work as if it were a blood pact. It wasn't. It was a gig. In the current production cycle, you aren't an artist; you're a vendor. And vendors get replaced when the client decides they can do the job themselves—or at least put their name on the final invoice.

There’s a specific kind of friction when two egos of this size collide in a space as claustrophobic as a Netflix production schedule. Imagine the sessions. Darbar trying to recapture the magic of the early 2000s while Bhansali is looking at global metrics and "visual storytelling." If Darbar spent 1.5 years on this, there’s a massive graveyard of discarded files somewhere. That’s a lot of wasted CPU cycles and even more wasted emotional bandwidth.

The trade-off for Darbar was supposed to be a comeback. A return to the spotlight via the biggest platform on the planet. Instead, he got a front-row seat to his own obsolescence.

We like to pretend that streaming has ushered in a golden age for creators. It hasn’t. It’s just professionalized the erasure. If a director can claim the music, the production design, and the lighting as their own personal epiphany, the stock price of their "brand" goes up. The collaborator becomes a ghostwriter. They become a "consultant" whose name is buried in the scroll-past-this-to-the-next-episode button.

Bhansali hasn't said much in return. Why would he? When you’re sitting on top of a mountain of Netflix’s cash, you don't argue with the people you stepped on to get there. You just adjust your crown and wait for the next awards cycle.

Darbar is left holding eighteen months of memories and a quote that’s already being buried by the next trailer drop. He’s shocked that a man he considered a brother chose the credit over the connection. He shouldn't be. In an industry obsessed with the myth of the solo creator, the "brother" is always the first one to get cut from the final edit.

How many more years of your life would you give to someone who considers you a temporary plugin?